Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement. Twelve months ago, our minister, Jason Clare, announced that we had all states and territories signed on for the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, a 10-year agreement that fixes public schools' funding once and for all. I want to talk about this today because it's something close to my heart. It's close to my heart as an educator. It's close to my heart as a former principal. It is closer to my heart as the member for Lalor, because I've spent the last 13 years here in the federal parliament, having left schools, and in that time I watched the former coalition government let down my community and let down public schools across this nation. This sets that right.

This agreement means that I can be assured that the private schools in my electorate will no longer be funded more generously by the Commonwealth. Where that was happening in some of our private schools locally, I now know that that student resource standard is going to be met in my public schools. I'm going to know that, in all the schools in Lalor, every student is being supported as was envisaged with the Gonski review into school funding. Nothing could be more important than this, because education not only shapes lives but transforms lives. As the member for Lalor I need the certainty that all students in the schools in my electorate are getting their fair share of the resources and also getting resourced to a level that will see them all get the same opportunities. That's what's critically important.

For the parents watching at home, this is about what we call the Schooling Resource Standard. This is set as a minimum standard, a minimum funding level for every student. It is set at the estimated level of total public funding that each school should receive to meet the educational needs of its students. At the moment, the base per-student amount is $14,467 for a child in primary school and $18,180 for a child in high school. On top of that, there should be funding that goes to loading—loading that's contextualised around need, around location, around school size, around socio-educational disadvantage, around Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander students and around students with a disability. It means students from those priority equity cohorts attract additional funding above the base amount, and that varies from school to school. That means that now, in 2025, public school students receive, on average, about $21,376 in SRS funding.

That is not met fully by the Commonwealth. But what has happened here is that something that had been set in stone by those opposite has now been removed. Those opposite left government providing certainty for private schools and doubt for public schools, a system where private schools could be assured of 100 per cent of their Student Resource Standard from the Commonwealth while public schools were left with a cap of only 20 per cent allowed from the Commonwealth under law. In no-one's mind was this seen as something that was fair across the country. It left doubt for public schools and for states and territories, because those states and territories weren't guaranteed or given certainty around the level of funding that was going to be provided by the Commonwealth, because they were told they would be left to do all the heavy lifting.

In doing this, those opposite baked in disadvantage. They undermined our universal education system. They tried to create hard class barriers that would have meant that, as a society, whether you went to a public or a private school would become a determinant of how far you would go in life. Make no mistake: this was not an accident; this was planned, and it was implemented by the former government.

I want to make sure everyone at home knows where they can find all this information. If you go to the Commonwealth's My School website you can have a look at all our local schools. You can see how they're funded, who they're funded by and the levels of funding. You can also see their performance against the NAPLAN standards, not just as a raw fix of what happened at that school but also where they sit in terms of advantage and disadvantage and therefore what value adding they're doing in their classrooms. I can tell you, as the proud member for Lalor, that we have public schools kicking way above their weight, doing extraordinary work, with students making two-plus years of progress in the classrooms in our community. So I'd encourage everybody at home to look at that. Obviously a question I'm often asked is, 'Which school should I send my child to?' I am often asked that in my community, and my advice to those parents is always the same: 'Go onto the My School website and check out our local schools'—check out the funding models; you can see all of that information. You can also see how those schools are travelling, how they're progressing and how they're value adding or not for local families and local students.

So I want to make sure our community is informed about these things. I want to make sure our community understand that this government has the back of every child in our community and, most importantly, every teacher in our school systems, and it has a clear intention for education to improve; it has commitments.

We have committed to increasing the proportion of students leaving school with a year 12 certificate to 83.8 per cent, up from 76.3 per cent in 2022. This would be the highest rate of year 12 certification ever achieved. Under those opposite, guess what happened? Retention rates in schools dropped. That means fewer students finished year 12. Numbers dropped dramatically. They're on their way back under a Labor government, as I would have expected. We're going to increase the proportion of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people aged 20 to 24 attaining year 12 or an equivalent qualification to 96 per cent by 2031.

We are setting targets to measure our performance and our schools' performance against. We're going to reduce the proportion of students in the 'needs additional support' NAPLAN category for reading and numeracy by 10 per cent and increase those in the 'strong' and 'exceeding' categories by 10 per cent by 2030. Again, that's a real, hard, fast target. We're setting a target to raise the student attendance rate to pre-COVID levels, up from 88.6 per cent in 2023. The target is to get that to 91.4 per cent.

The Better and Fairer Schools Agreement is truly an Australian effort. It comes together with the contribution of different levels of government, First Nations education representatives and independent education bodies. The reforms are key in achieving the Labor government's tertiary education target, ensuring that 80 per cent of the workforce have a university degree or TAFE qualification by 2050, because that's what this country needs us to do. The reforms will increase transparency for taxpayer funds and their distribution into bettering the education system. We're going to support our teachers to do the things that they and we as a government know will make a difference in our classrooms.

We're going to support school leaders to do that work. We're going to support every school in the country to do the best by our students. But, most importantly, we have we are righting a wrong—a wrong done under the previous government—that baked class systems into our education system, something that I know most Australians would never, ever want to see. I know that most Australians believe that our universal health system and our universal education system are the most important aspects of our egalitarian society, worth defending in every suburb, in every country town and in this place every day.

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